Movie Review: Fear City

2/10

It's harsh to bash a film you know is going to be awful, but this was my Christmas present from my old buddy Chris (who I incidentally bought Tobe Hooper's Crocodile for his birthday, so I deserved this). We are connoisseurs of the crap film, having especial love for the triumvurate of Tom Berenger, Billy Zane, and Arnold Vosloo. Of these three, this film only featured Tom Berenger but gave us the bonus rubbishness of Melanie Griffith and Billy Dee Williams.

It is gloriously terrible, though not in the fun way many of our movie choices are, and about halfway in I found the comedy gave way to a seeping depression. What's the movie about? Wel, some freak is killing strippers and other "scum" on the streets of the city. Our heroes run a talent agency for strippers and Tom himself is a retired boxer (he killed a guy in the ring, btw) and they eventually decide to try and stop the killer themselves.

It makes many horrific and hilarious movie errors, one is that it allows a whole sentence of dialogue to be slowed down in the boxing flashback ("yoooooooouuuuu! whhhhhhhyyyyyyyyy diiiiiiiiidn'tttt yoooooooouuuuuu stooooooooop theeeeeeeee fiiiiiiiiiiiiighhhhhht?), the bad guy is played by a martial artist who can't act so his dialogue is limited to a voiceover that seems to have been written by a teenager and it equates hand waving with character development.

But what of our stars? You may well ask, Berenger is not known for his range, and even this role is too much for him. Melanie Griffith gets her tits out a lot but is not prepared to kiss her (female) lover since that would be distasteful (!) and Billy Dee WIlliams clearly doesn;t want to be there. I mean that literally, his dialogue is delivered in a style only describable as "early finish". It is the most phoned in performance I've seen for ages.

And there are a lot of breasts. It's as if the director just shot a load of footage of the strippers (poor choice of words there, for which I apologise) and then had to justify it to his wife by including as much of it as possible. Like all seedy little movies of its kind, the women's strips don't come over as sexy, more grotesque and depressing.

These films survive to be watched due to a form of ridiculousness that renders them sort of "cult" - surely noone looks at the box for this, or for that matter Crocodile and thinks they are going to be good? Especially when you consider that for the price of three of these bad movies I got a copy of 2001: A Space Oddessy (at least, when I bought it that was the price).

Nevertheless even for connoisseurs such as myself and Chris, you're better off with something else.